Tricks for writing great team bios

Great photo by Andrea Piacquadio

​A client of ours recently wanted us to rewrite their team members’ LinkedIn bios, and then their website bios, in that order. 
 
Would you do the same thing? Should you? In that order? 
 
In this article, we’ll look at some of the too-easy pitfalls of team bio-writing, and also give you some good, quick, useful tips that can help you look great, and drive more business. 
 
Who’s on first?
 
When that client asked us to start with the LinkedIn bios, we suggested otherwise. In this instance, it was better to start with the company’s own website. 
 
That’s because it was more free-form, less rigid than LinkedIn. We could do whatever we wanted. We could steal from it, for LinkedIn, later. 
 
And that’s what we did. 
 
For your business, you want your and your team’s bios to effectively accomplish two things: 

1) You want to establish that person’s credibility. Do they know their stuff? Are they the absolute go-to subject matter expert for their field? 
 
2) You want to make them come across as likable. (Not that they aren’t already.) The goal here is for the reader to think, “If I’m gonna be working with this company for the next several months, I’d be happy to work with this person. They seem cool.” 
 
Teaser alert: You can actually address both of these goals in order. But we’ll get to that in a minute. 
 
Person to person
 
As you surely know, some website bios are written in first person (“I’m in charge of Finance”), whereas others are written in third person (“Jill is in charge of Finance”). 
 
Which should you use? 
 
(By the way, “Which should you use?” is in second person. But we digress.) 
 
Consider the arguments for each: 

• First person comes directly from the person whose bio you’re reading. It’s like they’re talking to you: “I’m in charge of this. I do this each day. I’m a nice person because of blah, blah, blah.” 

 

• Third person reads as if someone else wrote it. It’s a little more distant. It doesn’t speak directly from the subject, and to the reader. 

 
So this seems easy, right? “First person” carries the day. 
 
Not so fast. 
 
Think of Goal 1 from above: Establish Credibility. Here, you’ll want to blitz the reader with name-dropping and awards and accolades, so there’s absolutely no ambiguity about how technically superior this person is. 
 
Uh-oh. If you write that in first person, it comes across as conceited. Really conceited: 
 
“I have won awards for my work with major enterprises worldwide such as Coca-Cola and Amazon, where clients always told me how great I am.”
 
Uggh. Don’t go there. 
 
And so, third person it is. More often than not: 
 
“Jill has won numerous client-elected awards for her stellar performance working with major enterprises worldwide such as Coca-Cola and Amazon.”
 
The second act
 
As we’d hinted above, the bio follows a two-act structure, in the order of the two goals ("Expertise," and "Fun to Work With"). 
 
So after you’ve wowed your reader with all the awards and name-dropping, you can get into just a few interesting, quirky details which are nice setups for conversation-starters when a client first engages you. We recently read the bio of a client we were going to work with, and it noted that she had previously served in an exotic location overseas, so we were curious to ask her about that. 
 
Stuck for ideas—or for getting consistent responses from your team—for this Act II assignment? We once helped an ad agency write their team bios, and we worked up a questionnaire which was circulated to the entire team. The initial questions were predictable: 

• What’s your title? 

 

• What’s your role? 

 

• What do you in a typical day? 

 
But then, to button it, we made the last question a fill-in-the-blank: 

• People think I’m crazy because... 

 
They loved it. The answers were great and off-the-wall, and there was hardly any work required to edit them down to make them website-palatable. Indeed, the ad agency kept the “Questionnaire” format on their website—a good example of when First Person actually is the better way to go. 
 
Tying it all up
 
Some basic pointers: 

• Keep them short. No one wants to read a novel. They don’t care about what year you got that degree. 

 
That said, leaders’ bios should generally be longer than team members’ bios. Twice as long is completely fine. 

• Steal for LinkedIn. You did all your work, working up the facts; now you can effectively export those to LinkedIn, hewing to their format. Note that if you’d opted for First Person, you might want to shift to Third Person for LinkedIn. 

 
And that’s about it. It sounds simple, but it’s really more straightforward than easy. The more succinct the bio, the better—and the more challenging. 
 
Need help? Contact us. We’ve helped lots of teams with tons of bios. And we’d be delighted to help you, too.

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